Joan Sydney’s son Tony Braxton-Smith, who is the CEO of Great Southern Railway, was featured on the first episode of the second season of Undercover Boss Australia, which aired on September 12, 2011. (He is Joan’s eldest child and described himself on the show as “a love child”.)

The episode included some early pictures of Joan as well as footage of a dinner with Joan and Tony’s family where Tony announced her would appear on Undercover Boss.

I don’t know that I would have immediately recognized Joan just from the current day footage — it’s amazing how much your physiology changes as you grow older — but her voice is unmistakably Matron Sloan.

That day isn’t today, unfortunately. But hopefully soon. (I’m decluttering and part of the decluttering is getting rid of a load of notes and papers I have related to the updates for this site. I can’t throw them out because I need to transfer the information on them to the site and I can’t finish decluttering with them hanging around. Oh, it all goes round and round…)

Where have I been?

I’ve been away from the updates I *was* working on for months. When I last posted (in February), my mother had just recently had a stroke. A few weeks after that, they stopped her chemotherapy (for ovarian cancer) because it just wasn’t working. I went down to visit with her one last time in late June, and she died just after midnight on August 5. I still don’t know what to do with myself.

Moving to Joomla

I’ve put the move to a Joomla-driven site on hold. Part of it is a control issue, as in I feel I don’t have the kind of fine control I need/want when using a content management system like Joomla. I will likely eventually finish the conversion, more as an exercise than anything else, but for the foreseeable future, the site will be static HTML pages. So, my plans for the immediate future of the site are to just (for the love of God!) finish the original redesign so that I can start thinking about adding content. (There’s a ton of that that I just haven’t gotten around to adding.)

So, please stick with me. If you’ve e-mailed me and haven’t gotten a response, please try again. I’ve had a memory like a sieve over the last year or so and probably just forgot to reply to you. It’s nothing personal so please feel free to bug me about it.

Sorry for long absence. And so much for a speedy site redesign. Well, that’s pretty typical for me, as you probably already realize — I have a very short attention span, it seems and I’m easily distr….ooo, shiny.

Family troubles have been keeping me away. My mother was diagnosed with her third bout of cancer late last year, and about a week and a half ago suffered a stroke. So my brain has been everywhere but here for months.

Still, I do plan on finishing the new redesign. I’m moving the site to a Joomla platform (it’s about 5% done so far) to make it easier to maintain and hopefully easier for other people to help out if they want. (That’s the beauty of a content management system.)

It’s going. Slowly, but it’s going. I’d estimate that it’s about 40% done right now, but that clearly means I won’t be unveiling it this long weekend. The problem is that I keep getting sidetracked by things I want to change as I’m trying to port the information over from the old format to the new — it adds a considerable amount to the time it’s taking. So I’m resetting the countdown clock until November 1, 2009, giving me 2 more months to finish the work.

Personally, I don’t see the issue. But, then, I’m not in their target demographic. I wonder — were the people who complained people who might actually benefit from the service but were offended by the delivery, or just the usual suspects who feel it is their duty to complain at the drop of a hat on behalf of someone else?